Well, Saturday I decided it was time to "evict" (Sean, my videographer's word) this hive and relocate them into a conventional hive box. They were perfectly happy in the limb, but they weren't gonna do me any good in there.
Now, Sean shot a lot of video on this, and I'll post that as soon as he's got it edited and uploaded. But the basics steps were this:
1. Prepare the new hive box and position it next to the log.
2. Slice and dice the log with a chain saw, taking care to guide the blade through wood, and pulling back whenever I felt the blade hit hollow space.
3. Vacuum bees into my homemade bee-vac, while removing comb.
4. Rubber band the removed comb into frames, and put the frames in the box.
5. Dump the bees from the vacuum into the new hive.
6. Reduce their entrance so they could defend their new home, and remove the log.
All of which sounds straightforward, right? Well, as you'll see from the video once I get it posted, it was a bit of a scene. Learned some good lessons, which I'll note along with the video, so they make more sense.
At any rate, here's a shot of the log once I opened it up.
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